We like to keep things succinct around here. So behold the many ch-ch-changes of David Bowie, filmed in one minute, and in one continuous take. And when you’re done, check out 50 Years of Changing David Bowie Hair Styles in One Animated GIF. More Bowie material from the OC archive awaits you below.

Having just begun rewatching season 3 of the always-relevant The Wire—the season to first introduce Reg E. Cathey’s super-smooth character, mayoral aide Norman Wilson—I was delighted to find an episode of Studio 360 that features the actor reading a text by jazz great Charles Mingus.

How does 109-year-old Alfred “Alfie” Date keep himself busy? Apparently by knitting sweaters for endangered penguins. The oldest man in Australia, Alfie began knitting these little sweaters at the request of The Penguin Foundation in 2013, after hundreds of Little Penguins were injured by a big oil spill.

Richard Dawkins — some know him as the Oxford evolutionary biologist who coined the term “meme” in his influential 1976 book, The Selfish Gene; others consider him a leading figure in the New Atheism movement, a position he has assumed unapologetically.

Images via JustSayGnome
The Noam Chomsky Garden Gnome. That’s right, I said it, the Noam Chomsky Garden Gnome.
Over at justsaygnome.net, you can buy, when they’re available, two versions of “Gnome Chomsky the Garden Noam.

Over the holidays, the cast of Downton Abbey let their hair down a bit when they released a nine-minute parody of the ITV show. It stars George Clooney, and there’s even a little cameo by Jeremy Piven. It’s quite funny. Don’t miss it.
Now comes something even more relaxed.

During the 1950s, when a hula hoop craze swept across America, the Carlon Products Corp. (a company that specialized in making lightweight plastic pipes), managed to produce some 50,000 hula hoops per day. That got other companies thinking.

Is there anything worse than flying from Newark to San Francisco? Maybe it’s watching mannequins taking this cross-country flight. Talk about tedium. And yet there’s something a little brilliant about this six hour advertisement from Virgin Airlines — which promises a more inspiring flight.

Winning a Nobel Prize has its perks. When you talk, people listen. And you end up doing a lot of talking. And travelling.
Reflecting on how the Nobel Prize changed his life, Walter Gilbert (1980 winner in Chemistry) commented, “You can find yourself spending years travelling and talking right after winning.

Last Monday, Yukie Ota, a Japanese born flutist now living in Chicago, was performing in the first round of the Carl Nielsen International Flute Competition in Denmark, when a butterfly flitted across the stage and landed, rather inconveniently, on the bridge of her nose.

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About Us

Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.